DRY WATER
The velvet fur of religion The polish of knife handle & coin The universe of organic gears or microscope mechanical embryo metal doll The night is a steel machine grinding its slow stained wheels The brain is filled w/ clocks, & drills & water down drains Knife-handle, thick blood like the coin & cloth they rub & the skin they love to touch the graveyard, the tombstone, the gloomstone & runestone The sand & the moon, mating deep in the Western night waiting for the escape of one of our gang The hangman's noose is a silver sluice bait come-on man your meat is hanging on the wing of the raven man's bird, poet's soul Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh the thin rustle of weeds the voice comes from faraway inside, awaiting its birth in a cool room, on tendril bone The insane free chummy cackle of infants in a ballroom, of a family of friends around a table, laden w/ feast-food soft guilty female laughter the bar-room, the men's room people assemble to establish armies & find their foe & fight
Clustered in watchful terror by vine-growth, the hollow bush dry cancerous wells We awoke before dawn, slipped into the canyon Noon schoolyard screamed w/ play, the lunch hour ending ropes & balls slapped hard at cement sand, the female land was bright, all swelling to degree most comfortless & guarding A record noise shot out & stunned the earth. The music had been bolted w/ new sound. Run, run the end of repose an anthem has churned the bad guys are winning.
Silver shaken in the gloom I left her Trees waste & sway forever Marble porch & sylvan frieze Down on her knees She begs the spider-king to wed her Slides into bed He turns her over There is a leather pouch that's full of silver It spills like water She left And took the coins I gave her
As to the drowning man hoarse whisper invokes, on the edge, an arroyo Sangre de Christo Violence in a time of plenty There is one deaf witness on the bank, the shore leaning in finery against a ruined wall as Jesus did. Red livid lips, pale flesh withdrawn from ragged dress, pit of the past & screens unveiled in the scarred chalk wall When, often, one is not deluged by rain, 3 drops suffice The war is over there I am neither doctor nor saint Christ or soldier Now, friends, don't look at me sadly ranting like some incomprehensible child I know by my breath of what I speak, & what I've seen needs telling. Please, freeze! Danger near. A message has started its path to the heart of the brain A thin signal is on its way An arrow of hope, predicting rain A death-rod bearing pain
I will not come again I will not come again into the swirl The bitter wine-soaked stallion eats the seed, all labor is a lie; no vice is kindled in these loins to melt or vie w/ any strong particulating smile. Leave sundry stones alive.
Now that you have gone all alone the desert to explore & left me here alone the calmness of the town where a girl in black gets in a car & searches numbly for her keys; Now that you have gone or strayed away- I sit, & listen to the hiss of traffic & invoke into this burned & gutted room some ghost, some vague resemblance of a time Off-on, on and off, like one long sick electric dream. This state is confused state. Out there her life like warm connectors, plug into her soul From every side & melt her form for me. But I deserve this, Greatest cannibal of all. Some tired future. Let me sleep. Get on w/ the disease.